clined to talk, and though he himself had no
fancy for entering into conversation with servants, he made a remark in
the nature of a question.

'I dare say his Excellency sometimes does not come home before
morning.'

'Sometimes, sir,' answered Gaetano, grinning in his big black beard.
'But then he generally gives me notice, so that I need not sit up all
night. He is a very good-hearted young gentleman, sir, as I dare say you
know, for you are a friend of his. And since you have asked me if he has
come home, and you are perhaps waiting for him, I can tell you that he
will not be back to-night, nor perhaps to-morrow, for that was the
message he sent me by his valet this afternoon.'

'Thank you,' said Stradella. 'But I am not waiting for him. I am
expecting my wife and my man.'

He nodded and went back to his beat under the archway, and before he had
walked twice the distance between the gate and the courtyard, all the
bells of Rome rang out the first hour of the night. An hour had passed
since Ortensia had let Gambardella out of the little house in the Via di
Santa Sabina.

The peal was still ringing from the belfry of the Lateran when Don
Alberto and Tommaso met on the green behind the church, not far from the
closed door of the sacristy. They came from opposite directions, and
Tommaso was leading two saddled mules. The young courtier had succeeded
in making his escape from Queen Christina and her party, promising to
join them at supper at the Palazzo Riario within an hour.

In the lonely little house in Via di Santa Sabina, Ortensia was sitting
upstairs by the table, pale and upright in her chair, and listening for
the slightest sound that might break the profound silence.

But she heard nothing. The three wicks of the brass lamp on the table
burned with a steady flame, and without any of those very faint
crepitations which olive-oil lamps make heard when the weather is about
to change. There was not the least sound in the small house: if there
were mice anywhere they were asleep; if worms were boring in the old
furniture they were working silently; if any house swallows had made
their nests under the eaves they were roosting. The stillness was like
that of a solid and inert mass, as if all the world had been suddenly
petrified and made motionless.

It seemed to Ortensia that she had never been quite alone for so long a
time in her life; it was certainly true that she had never before been
locked up in a lone